The advent of mobile devices with location determination capabilities has resulted in the development of a wide variety of location-based services, including location-based advertising. Vendors with physical locations are interested in driving local traffic through advertising on mobile devices. The combination of location-based services and mobile advertising has enabled vendors to target mobile device users within specified areas.
Location-based advertising is based on the premise that users' locations and their proximity to a place of interest impact the performance of an advertising campaign. Location-based advertising has developed to enable advertisers to analyse campaign performance by individual places of interest across millions of locations to understand precisely where within a location consumers are active and what they are doing.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,848,765 describes methods and systems for providing location based services. A user interface is provided that enables a user of a portable electronic device to define a geofence. The user determines a current location of the portable electronic device using an interactive map on the portable electronic device and the current location is monitored by an application server with respect to the geofence. When the application server determines that the current location of the portable electronic device is within the geofence, instructions are transmitted to the portable electronic device to cause said device to offer a service to the user that is not offered when the user is external to the geofence.
Technology applications of geofencing have focussed upon providing user defined areas where information is provided. Location based services focus upon the collection of consumer information which is concerned with predicting consumer behaviour.